Mono+Sub: Compressing Light Field as Monocular Image and Subsidiary Data

Ryosuke Imazu, Chihiro Tsutake, Keita Takahashi, Toshiaki Fujii

Abstract: A light field is usually represented as a set of multi-view images captured from a two-dimensional (2-D) array of viewpoints and requires a large amount of data compared with a standard 2-D image. We propose a 2-D compatible light-field compression method for encoding a light field as a 2-D monocular image and subsidiary data. In terms of the image quality, we prioritize the central image (regarded as the 2-D monocular image) over the other images in the light field, because the light field is considered an extension of the 2-D monocular image. To this end, we encode and decode the monocular image using a standard image codec and introduce a learned encoder and decoder pair for the subsidiary data. Experimental results indicate that our method achieved promising rate-distortion performance, especially for extremely low bit-rate ranges. Even though our method requires only a small amount of subsidiary data compared with those for the monocular image, the entire light field can be reconstructed with reasonable visual quality.

External IDs:dblp:conf/vcip/ImazuTTF24